Coiled tubing is used for interventions in oil and gas wells and production tubing. Coiled tubing equipment may be mounted on trucks, trailers, or skids. Skid and trailer mounted equipment can be permanently affixed, or mounted in such a manner where it is removable from a trailer with little effort. Coiled tubing equipment that is easily transported and serviceable offers owners the best return on their investment. Ideally, transporting coiled tubing equipment efficiently decreases well service costs and reduces man-hours and jobsite injuries. Due to the depths of wells, the tubing footage needed to complete most well servicing jobs has increased, which in turn, the methods of transportation have been strained. Trailer lengths have been extended to offer more axles to allow more equipment or tubing to be transported to and from jobsites. By its inherent nature, the equipment needed for operations is heavy and requires specially modified trailers designed to transport loads of extreme weight, height, length, and width. In most circumstances the amount of weight that is required for the truck tractor and the trailer to haul is in excess of highway regulations. This presents issues with weight distribution, and load adjustments have to be made to conform to laws relating to weight and distribution of over-axle weight.
The heaviest item on a coiled tubing trailer is a spooled coiled tubing reel. In some cases a spooled reel will exceed 100,000 lbs. of weight, and the ability to shift the weight forwards or rearwards will allow increased flexibility in meeting highway laws. Consequently, the coiled tubing injector is the second heaviest item that is placed on the reel trailer, and the ability to shift the weight forwards or rearwards will allow increased flexibility in meeting highway laws.
Previous solutions to ease the weights of the spooled coiled tubing trailers have been to add more axles in the form of a “Jeep” to the fifth wheel of the trailer. The “Jeep” is connected to the truck tractor fifth wheel and has typically 1-3 axles and has its own fifth wheel in which the trailer sits. This allows improved distribution of weight on the front to middle of the trailer caused by the spooled coiled tubing reel. Another solution was the addition of a “Booster” which attaches by bolting or pinning to the rear of the trailer, and has typically 1-3 axles and helps distribute the weight from the trailer axles to the booster axles in order to offset the over-axle weight that the coiled tubing injector induces onto the trailer axles. Jeeps and boosters present several issues, including lengthening of the complete unit, which makes turning radiuses greater and presents time and personnel issues on having to connect and disconnect these units. Jeeps and boosters must also be disconnected prior to operation of the coiled unit at each job site.
Another previous solution was to have several positions along the length of the trailer for the spooled coiled tubing reel to be either mounted permanently to, or temporarily set into place by brackets or affixed positioning devices mounted along the trailer. This proved to be feasible; however, the time needed along with the addition of a crane to lift the spooled coiled tubing reel, proved that the method is not cost effective. What is needed then is an improved coiled tubing transport trailer for maximizing coiled tubing load distribution.